Early this year, after re-reading some of my old favorite S&S fiction, I discovered that I really wanted to create a kind of sandboxed campaign incorporating many of my favorite science-fantasy themes straight from the pages of the classic fantasy writers of the ’60s and ’70s that I grew up with. I wanted to really focus on my favorite weird stuff from Gary Gygax’s Appendix N like Michael Moorcock’s multiverse, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and various works by Roger Zelazny. Outside of the Appendix N literature, I was also heavily influenced by Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique Cycle (as was Jack Vance, I might add).
I knew that I wanted it to combine together the elements of Science-Fiction and Fantasy that were so common in the days before every other book on the bookstore shelves was an unremarkable 800 page high-fantasy Tolkien-clone. I wanted weird chaos-warped wastelands, psionics mixed with magic, and mysterious ancient technology buried below the surface just waiting for the player characters to find and use to fight the forces of darkness.
So, I set myself to crafting Artume, my odd little post-apocalyptic hollow-world prison planet to be the sandbox where I could both host entertaining games and explore the S&S that I was interested in. I quickly decided on using the Old-School Essentials (OSE) ruleset to run the games as it allowed for the OSR flavor I was looking for with a nicely updated format that made it more appealing for me than just trying to use a vintage RPG such as AD&D 1e. OSE was also the right choice for Artume as it has expansions in the form of zines that add to the weirdness with psionics and energy weapons…just what I needed to make my science-fantasy creation come to life.
As I needed a stage, some framing structure on which to build my sandbox campaign, I created the small and self-contained world of Artume and some starting locations and factions. Here is the campaign guide that I created for my players.
